Abstract

Green computing is a contemporary research topic to address climate and energy challenges. In this chapter, the authors envision the duality of green computing with technological trends in other fields of computing such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing on one hand and economy and business on the other hand. For instance, in order to provide electricity for large-scale cloud infrastructures and to reach exascale computing, we need huge amounts of energy. Thus, green computing is a challenge for the future of cloud computing and HPC. Alternatively, clouds and HPC provide solutions for green computing and climate change. In this chapter, the authors discuss this proposition by looking at the technology in detail.

2. Proposition

Our proposition in this chapter is that green computing is a dual technology for computing and communication technologies such as HPC and cloud computing. This means that green computing solutions will drive the development of HPC and cloud computing; on the other hand, HPC solutions and cloud computing solutions will drive the development of green computing. Therefore, we may say these technologies are dual to each other, thus we envision green computing as a dual technology for HPC and cloud computing.

On the other hand, HPC provides solutions for green computing and climate change. Complicated processes of new sources of energy, need exascale computing for modeling and simulation.

In addition, these contemporary technologies are moving toward Intelligent Computation in order to optimize resource and energy consumption without losing performance. Intelligent Computations are done with the techniques and mechanisms of new computing technologies such as hardware and software co-design, application profiling, and virtual machine consolidation to optimize resource consumption, and pay-as-you-go business model to reduce costs, etc.

In sum, if we solve the challenges and problems of HPC and exascale, we would implicitly solve many challenges in green computing such as access to new sources of energy, etc. Similarly, if we solve green computing challenges, we would solve HPC and cloud computing challenges such as the challenge of exascale power and building huge cloud data centers. This is the duality theorem we observe among energy efficiency, green computing and other technological trends in computing and communication technologies. This proposition is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Green computing: A dual technology for computing and communication technologies

In the remainder of this chapter, we go over some research work at the intersection of cloud computing and HPC with green computing to realize our observation and proposition of duality.